In part, whether Google is or is not ready to be the open access platform for scholarly communication, there are two hurdles 1) researchers’ practices and 2) the peer review process.

From the article, Timo Hannay, Managing Director of Digital Science is quoted:

The problem, he says, is not that there are too few options to publish in an open access format. It’s that most academics don’t think about it too much. “Most [academics] don’t particularly care about open access, in part because they are not incentivised to do so. This is changing, but only slowly, and right now most still care more about publishing in established, high-profile journals and in gaining a lot of citations.”

If Google, or another company, had a secret weapon to disrupt the peer review process, now that would be worth getting excited about.